Greek Loanwords

(2,671 words)

Despite the very extensive contacts between speakers of Greek and Arabic for over a thousand years between Alexander the Great and the advent of Islam, the paradoxical fact is that the forms of the two languages extant in recoverable documents show very few traces of such contacts. In an area where mutual influence was presumably most profound, that of spoken forms of the languages, no documentation has survived for either the Greek or the Arabic spoken in places where such interpenetration coul…